Red Housekeeping in A Socialist Factory Jiashu and

International Review of Social History (2024), pp.
1–24
doi:10.1017/S0020859023000706
RESEARCH ARTICLE
“Red Housekeeping” in a Socialist Factory: Jiashu

and Transforming Reproductive Labor in Urban
China (1949–1962)*
Yige Dong
Department of Sociology, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, United States
E-mail: yigedong@buffalo.edu
Abstract
While scholarship on “women’s liberation” under historically existing socialism focuses on
heroic women making inroads into male-dominated domains, this article explores a
previously overlooked group of women in socialist China. Known as jiashu in Chinese,
these women are the female dependents (wives, mothers, and in-laws) of both male and
female employees in a workplace. Specifically, it centers on the experiences of the jiashu
of textile workers in the city of Zhengzhou from 1949 to 1962. It argues that, despite
being portrayed as “parasitizing” off formal workers, jiashu performed a wide range of
work, both paid and unpaid, inside and outside the household. Similar to their
counterparts under capitalism and other state-socialist regimes, these Chinese women’s
unpaid domestic work sustained the daily and generational reproduction of the labor
force and was thus essential to industrial accumulation. Moreover, jiashu also worked on
the shopfloor and in collectivized service facilities as paid laborers. Such remunerated
work also subsidized accumulation, and the resistance from these women contributed to
the eventual collapse of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962). This research advances
the field in two ways. First, it expands theories about the relationship between women’s
work, social reproduction, and capital accumulation to include work that is both
reproductive in nature and remunerated – a previously understudied form of labor.
Second, while existing literature focuses on structural analysis and explains why
women’s work is functional to accumulation, this study gives equal attention to women’s
agency, showing how interactions between the two shaped historical trajectories.
*The author thanks the anonymous contacts in Zhengzhou who made this research possible, the two
anonymous reviewers who provided invaluable comments and suggestions, as well as colleagues who
have offered feedback since the initial draft was written in 2019. They include Jacob Eyferth, Suzanne
Gottschang, Gail Hershatter, Joel Andreas, Tobie Meyer-Fong, Rebecca Karl, Erin Hatton, Yueran Zhang,
Simon S. Luo, Zoe Zhao, Qiang Fu, Xiaojun Feng, Ann Waltner, and participants in workshops at the
University of Hong Kong, New York University, and Lingnan University where I presented various drafts
of this article. The research and writing of this article were supported by the Woodrow Wilson
Foundation, the Luce Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Kaifeng Foundation,
and the Association for Asian Studies. This article is dedicated to Dr Xiaohong Xu (1978–2023), my dear
friend and fellow researcher in the field of critical studies of revolutionary China.
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale
Geschiedenis. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706 Published online by Cambridge University Press

2 Yige Dong
Introduction
When asked whether she had to balance work and home life while serving as a factory
head six decades ago, Hang Huilan, now in her nineties, shared the following: “Many
women comrades had a heavy family burden, but I didn’t, because I had ‘Mother Shen’
[Shen ma] who would help out.”1 Joining the underground Communist Party in
Shanghai in 1942 when she was only fifteen, Hang rose quickly as a woman party
cadre after the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was established in 1949. Then, in
1958, she moved to Zhengzhou, the capital city of Henan Province, to lead the
Zhengzhou Number One Textile Mill.
As one of the only two female factory heads in Zhengzhou’s history, Hang’s name
was brought up frequently by local people I interviewed.2 Her prominence in the
bureaucratic system and her suffering during the tumultuous Cultural Revolution
(1966–1976) made Hang an unforgettable figure in the local collective memory.
Therefore, when I finally had the privilege to speak to Hang herself, I was surprised
to hear the story of Mother Shen backstage, as it had never been mentioned by any
of my interviewees. Since Mother Shen had passed away many years ago, I could
only reconstruct her story through Hang’s account:
Mother Shen, whose maiden name I cannot recall now, married my husband’s
brother and had lived in Jiangsu, a province near Shanghai. In the late 1950s,
when my husband’s brother died and left behind his wife and two young
children, the three of them came to Zhengzhou and sought refuge with my
family. In the beginning, Mother Shen was a jiashu, living with us, helping me
cook, taking care of my two children and my sick parents-in-law, in addition
to her own children. That’s why I never cooked. Later, in the 1970s, the
neighborhood community started running small factories, and she went to
work in one of those to earn a wage. She said, “Everyone has two hands, and I
shouldn’t be eating free meals at home”. A few years later, when her daughter
found a job as a schoolteacher, Mother Shen and her children moved out.
After she left, I didn’t know how to do housework, so I started hiring a paid
nanny.
Mother Shen’s identity is a paradox. On the one hand, she was identified by Hang as a
jiashu, a Chinese term that refers to one’s extended family members, including
parents, spouses, children, siblings, and other relatives.3 While in imperial China
1
Interview with Hang Huilan, 7 December 2016.
2
This article is based on sources collected for a larger book project, The Fabric of Care: Women’s Work and
the Politics of Livelihood in Industrial China (1920–2020), which examines China’s century-long
transformation of reproductive labor. The current article combines sources at the national level as well as
those derived from an in-depth case study of Zhengzhou. For details about the interview data, see later
sections.
3
The two characters jia and shu literally mean “family” and “belonging”. The earliest usage can be traced
to the Han period (202 BC to 220 AD), when it referred to a person’s extended family members, especially
those who served in the military in frontier lands. See Xuehong Wei and Zonghui Hou, “A Study on the
Term ‘Family Members’ in the Han Dynasty Slips from Jianshuijinguan and Related Problems”,
Dunhuang Research, 4 (2017), pp. 107–114.

International Review of Social History 3
the term jiashu referred to extended family members of either sex in general, in the early
twentieth century, with the rise of industrialization and militarization, it started to be
associated with female family members, especially the wives of male workers and
military personnel.4 During the Mao period (1949–1976), jiashu continued to
connote such meaning and was increasingly understood as a feminine term. In typical
cases, jiashu was interchangeable with zhigong jiashu, which referred to dependents of
employees in a workplace. The term was also used in expressions related to political
identities such as lieshi jiashu (widows of revolutionary martyrs), zibenjia jiashu
(dependents of capitalists), and youpai jiashu (dependents of Rightists).5
On the other hand, adding ma (literally “mother” in Chinese) after the surname
was the standard way to address a female domestic maid in pre-revolutionary
China. Calling her sister-in-law “Mother Shen” reveals how Hang understood the
social and economic relationship between the two of them. By doing all the
domestic work in exchange for her and her two children’s subsistence, Mother Shen
essentially worked as a maid in Hang’s household. Mother Shen, however, seemed
to think of herself more as a free-riding family member than a maid. Hence, when
there was an opportunity to get a paid job, she did not hesitate to leave, because she
believed she had been “eating free meals at home”.
The tension between the label jiashu assigned to Shen and all the work she did, from
serving Hang’s family to working in the factory, is telling. It reveals that while the term
discursively implies one’s dependency on others, the person so labeled was actually
anything but simply a “dependent”. Despite constituting the official discourse in
Mao-era China and featuring in personal memories about the socialist past, jiashu as
historical actors have remained obscure, oftentimes escaping scholars’ scrutiny.
Unlike the most popularly circulated female supersymbols from the Mao era, such
as the “iron girls” – independent, strong, and muscular women peasants and industrial
workers6 – the subject of jiashu does not fit neatly into the discourse of “socialist
women’s liberation”. In the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) rhetoric, these
jiashu were “‘red’ housekeepers”. On the one hand, the term implies that the Party
designated jiashu as belonging primarily to the domestic space, asking them to
serve other family members who had a paid job. As a result, jiashu were oftentimes
overshadowed by their husbands and other women working in the public domain,
and even deemed “parasites of socialism”.7 On the other hand, “‘red’ housekeeping”
should be clearly distinguished from “homemaking”, a concept that emerged along
4
This observation is based on the author’s keyword search in Shen Bao (1872–1949), one of the most
popular and longest-running newspapers in modern China.
5
Rightists here refers to targets identified and attacked by the state during the Anti-Rightist Campaign
(1957–1959).
6
For a detailed discussion about the “iron girls”, see Wang Zheng, Finding Women in the State: A Socialist
Feminist Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1964 (Berkeley, CA, 2017), pp. 221–241; Yihong
Jin, Kimberley Ens Manning, and Lianyun Chu, “Rethinking the ‘Iron Girls’: Gender and Labour during the
Chinese Cultural Revolution”, Gender & History, 18:3 (2006), pp. 613–634.
7
One of the first appearances of “parasite” was in Liu Shaoqi’s Speech in Renmin ribao, 1 May 1950, even
though it was not directly targeted at housewives. The “parasite” criticism was most salient among jiashu of
the bourgeois class during the transition to socialism before 1956. For example, see Shanghai shi fulian,
“Women shi ruhe jiaoyu gongshangye jiashu de”, Funü gongzuo tongxun, 1 (1956), p. 9. For the
“rearguard” discourse, see Zhengzhou Municipal Archives, 029–055–003 (1963), p. 14.

4 Yige Dong
with the rise of the breadwinner–homemaker family regime under welfare capitalism.8
In the Chinese context, the boundaries of “the domestic” and “the household” themselves
underwent radical transformations in the 1950s. At the height of the Great Leap
Forward (1958–1962, GLF), when most urban housewives were required to work in
public spaces and many functions of the household were collectivized, jiashu became
the primary keepers of those newly created public spaces, starring one of the most
radical experiments with regard to social reproduction in history.
This study is first and foremost an empirical sketch of the tumultuous
trajectories of jiashu crossing different social spaces during the first decade of the
PRC. While I draw on a comprehensive collection of primary and second sources to
inform my national-level analysis, my account of the local dynamics is based on a
case study conducted in the city of Zhengzhou. Sources include documents
from the Zhengzhou Municipal Archives, local factory gazetteers, the Database for
the History of Chinese Contemporary Political Movements hosted by the Chinese
University of Hong Kong, as well as interviews with Zhengzhou textile workers and
their family members who lived through the socialist period.
Conceptually, this study deepens an ongoing conversation between feminist political
economy and studies of historically existing socialism in two ways. First, while existing
discussions on women’s work in relation to “socialist primitive accumulation” focus
on unpaid work based in the household,9 the current case extends to collectivized,
remunerated women’s work that used to be done in the household and explains how
such work also contributed to socialist accumulation. Second, going beyond
uncovering the logic of accumulation, this research also pays close attention to the
agency of historical actors. Instead of being passively subjugated to the state’s
top-down programs, Chinese women both within the party-state and at the grassroots
actively negotiated with the state by encompassing or resisting the category of
“jiashu”. Some of their endeavors, as I show, became part of the historical process that
derailed the GLF, one of the most ambitious projects under Mao.
Women’s Work, Social Reproduction, and Regimes of Accumulation

It has been well established that women’s paid and unpaid work played indispensable
roles in underpinning the historical formation of industrial capitalism.10 In the
8
This should not be confused with the notion of “municipal housekeeping”, which refers to bourgeois
women extending their political activism from the domestic sphere to the public sphere in
progressive-era America. Juliann Sivulka, “From Domestic to Municipal Housekeeper: The Influence of
the Sanitary Reform Movement on Changing Women’s Roles in America, 1860–1920”, Journal of
American Culture, 22:4 (1999), pp. 1–7.
9
Jacob Eyferth, “State Socialism and the Rural Household: How Women’s Handloom Weaving (and
Pig-Raising, Firewood-Gathering, Food-Scavenging) Subsidized Chinese Accumulation”, International
Review of Social History, 67:2 (2022), pp. 231–249; Shaopeng Song, “The State Discourse on Housewives
and Housework in the 1950s in China”, in Mechthild Leutner (ed.), Rethinking China in the
1950s (Münster [etc.], 2007), pp. 49–63; Shaopeng Song, Chinese Modernity and Socialist Feminist Theory
(New York, NY [etc.], 2022).
10
For instance, in Britain, before the rise of industrial capitalism, the household economy relied on
cooperation among family members in farming, workshops, trades, and other activities. See Louis
A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work, and Family (London, 1978); Deborah Simonton, A History of

pre-capitalist economy, women shouldered the lion’s share of tasks that sustained the
family’s daily subsistence and generational renewal.11 At the same time, they actively
participated in income-generating activities, such as spinning wool into textiles and
weaving textiles into cloth. Their monetary contribution to the household economy,
even though relatively small compared to that of men, proved to be crucial for
supporting the family during specific stages of its life cycle.12
Then, the advent of industrial capitalism brought about a profound transformation
in the social structure of women’s work, effectively obscuring its value – a process
sociologist Maria Mies called “housewifization”.13 With the majority of
income-generating tasks now being removed from the household and concentrated
in factories and other public domains, the household gradually lost its primary role
in organizing the economy. Despite initial periods when women (and children) also
worked outside the home, over the course of industrialization their labor force
participation experienced a decline. Concurrently, their dependence on men
increased. This was due not only to an increase in men’s real wages, but also
because legal institutions and cultural ideologies worked hand in hand to produce a
family-wage regime where the man emerged as the breadwinner and the woman as
the homemaker.14 Meanwhile, women continued to perform all the unpaid work in
the household. As these types of labor were not compensated in monetary terms,
they were often undervalued and thus deemed dismissible.
Moving beyond the empirical inquiry into the impact of industrial capitalism on
women’s work, the recently developed Social Reproduction Theory (SRT)15 – which
builds upon the analyses of socialist feminists from the 1970s16 – conceptualizes
women’s unpaid domestic work as part of the broader process of social
reproduction – processes that sustain the daily and generational renewal of human
beings and our societies. While SRT has insightfully exposed how women’s work
and, more broadly, social reproduction contribute to primitive and continuous
accumulation, its analytical scope is primarily limited to the dynamics under
capitalism. It is worthwhile asking whether and how women’s work configured
differently under historically existing socialism, where an alternative way of
organizing social reproduction was developed. When communist regimes in the
European Women’s Work: 1700 to the Present (New York, 1998); and Sara Horrell and Jane Humphries,
“The Origins and Expansion of the Male Breadwinner Family: The Case of Nineteenth-Century
Britain”, International Review of Social History, 42:S5 (1997), pp. 25–64.
11
These tasks included cooking, cleaning, childrearing, caring for other family members, as well as
self-provisioning activities like gleaning and gathering, growing sideline crops, and raising animals.
12
Horrell and Humphries, “The Origins and Expansions”, p. 36.
13
Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of
Labor (London, 2014).
14
Horrell and Humphries, “The Origins and Expansions”, pp. 46–63.
15
Tithi Bhattacharya (ed.), Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression
(London, 2017); Susan Ferguson, Women and Work: Feminism, Labour, and Social Reproduction
(London, 2020); Cinzia Arruzza, “Functionalist, Determinist, Reductionist: Social Reproduction Feminism
and Its Critics”, Science & Society, 80:1 (2016), pp. 9–30; Alessandra Mezzadri, “The Informal Labours of
Social Reproduction”, Global Labour Journal, 11:2 (2020), pp. 156–163.
16
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (Brooklyn, NY, 2004); Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James,
The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Bristol, 1972).

6 Yige Dong
twentieth century industrialized the economy and transformed social relations, one of
their fronts was mobilizing women into paid work and socializing reproductive
functions of the family.17 However, despite a theoretically promising foundation for
properly valorizing women’s work and promoting gender equality, no communist
regimes succeeded in materializing these goals.
A growing body of scholarship on “primitive socialist accumulation” could provide
some insights into understanding these predicaments: despite their claimed radical
departure from capitalism, historical communist regimes shared the same feature of
their antithesis, that is, to achieve rapid industrial accumulation at the cost of social
reproduction despite the rhetoric of social protections and welfare.18 Under some
circumstances, they even created new types of atrocity, such as forcing peasants to
collectivize their land and turn over most of the profits to the state.19 Furthermore,
in these rural communities it was predominantly peasant women who bore the
brunt of the over-accumulation.20 On the one hand, women were mobilized to
participate in agricultural production in the name of gender equality. On the other,
due to a lack of state support and persistent social customs, they were still obliged
to perform unpaid reproductive labor, which “decreased the necessary labor time
needed to reproduce workers’ life and labor power, and thus increased surplus labor
time, i.e., the time from which profit could be extracted”.21
Even in urban areas, where socialist welfare regimes offered better labor protection
and more developed public services, women’s reproductive labor still subsidized the
overall accumulation. Without an effective challenge to the perceived physiological
differences between men and women, women continued to be viewed as secondary
workers and primary caregivers.22 In the public domain, they were concentrated in
light industries and service sectors, which often paid less compared to men’s
occupations. At home, they continued to undertake a range of unpaid reproductive
labor, effectively subsidizing the underdeveloped welfare regime. This cultural
association between women’s work and social reproduction was further enhanced,
ironically, by state policies that protected women’s “special needs” at work and
granted generous maternity leave to mothers.
17
For instance, according to Alexandra Kollontai, one of the key architects of the communist program of
women’s liberation, women should not be confined to “restricted tasks of home economics, household
duties, etc.” but pursue “creative tasks in the sphere of production”. See Alexandra Kollontai, Alexandra
Kollontai: Selected Writings (New York, NY, 1977 [1916]), p. 183.
18
Wendy Z. Goldman, “Introduction: Primitive Accumulation and Socialism”, International Review of
Social History, 67:2 (2022), pp. 195–209.
19
Idem, “Blood on the Red Banner: Primitive Accumulation in the World’s First Socialist State”,
International Review of Social History, 67:2 (2022), pp. 211–229.
20
Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (Berkeley, CA, 2011);
Jacob Eyferth, “Women’s Work and the Politics of Homespun in Socialist China, 1949–1980”, International
Review of Social History, 57:3 (2012), pp. 365–391; idem, “State Socialism and the Rural Household”.
21
Idem, “State Socialism and the Rural Household”, p. 249.
22
Gail W. Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change (Berkeley, CA,
1978); Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, the State & Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936
(Cambridge, 1993); Sarah Ashwin, “Women’s Lives under Socialism”, Labour/Le Travailleur, 50 (2002),
pp. 261–273; Eva Fodor, “Smiling Women and Fighting Men: The Gender of the Communist Subject in
State Socialist Hungary”, Gender & Society, 16:2 (2002), pp. 240–263.

While existing analyses have sufficiently illustrated why women’s work is functional
to capital accumulation in both capitalist and state-socialist economies, they pay less
attention to tensions between the system’s accumulation needs and women’s agency
from the realm of social reproduction. The next section reviews key literature on
gender politics in relation to the political economy in socialist China, establishing
that the current study can help elucidate the dynamics between accumulation logic
and historical agency.
Women’s Work, Reproductive Labor, and Industrial Accumulation in

Socialist China
Similar to women in pre-capitalist Europe, those in late imperial China performed a
full range of household activities that either supported family subsistence or directly
generated cash income. For example, in the Yangtze Delta and the Pearl River
Delta, Han Chinese women not only undertook all the reproductive tasks in the
household, but they also did home spinning and weaving of both cotton and silk
products, which served as an important source of income.23 Then, the first wave of
industrialization at the turn of the twentieth century saw home-spun textiles and
other women’s handicrafts replaced by factory manufacturing, contributing to the
devaluation of Chinese women’s domestic work.24 This transformation culminated
in the middle of the century when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took over
the country.
The CCP’s gender programs were motivated by two factors. First, founded upon
Marxist–Leninist doctrines, the CCP conceived “liberating” women from the
household and making them participate in politics and the formal economy as an
integral part of the larger agenda of creating a classless society. Second, to achieve
ambitious goals in industrialization and agricultural development, the CCP
sometimes treated women as “a reserve army of labor”, the tapping of which would
be a necessary means to accelerate accumulation. Therefore, under the banner of
“women can hold up half the sky”,25 industrial and agricultural projects nationwide
incorporated an unprecedented number of women into the labor force.26
Consequently, images of the “iron girls” started to circulate and inspired many
women to thrive in traditionally male-dominated fields.
23
Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, CA, 1997);
Kenneth Pomeranz, “Women’s Work and the Economics of Respectability”, in Bryna Goodman and Wendy
Larson (eds), Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China
(Lanham, MD, 2005), pp. 239–264; Janice Stockard, Daughters of the Canton Delta: Marriage Patterns and
Economic Strategies in South China 1860–1930 (Stanford, CA, 1989).
24
Eyferth, “Women’s Work and the Politics of Homespun”.
25
Xueping Zhong, “Women Can Hold Up Half the Sky”, in Ban Wang (ed.), Words and Their Stories:
Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution (Leiden, 2010), pp. 227–247.
26
Throughout the Mao era, there were tensions between the two agendas, that is, liberating women and
treating them as a “reserve army of labor”. In the 1950s and early 1960s, women were hired or fired
depending on the regime’s economic boom or bust. After 1963, the state changed to a more stable
employment policy that aimed to offer all able-bodied men and women in urban areas permanent
employment.

8 Yige Dong
To facilitate “women’s liberation” and economic development, the CCP was also
determined to transform the domain of social reproduction. While earlier literature
held that the domestic domain was neglected in the party’s vision about building
socialism, recent studies have revealed a more complicated and nuanced picture. In
a nutshell, similar to other state-socialist regimes, socialist China also witnessed a
form of “primitive accumulation” that was based on undercompensating or free
riding on the work of peasants, informal workers, and other groups, including rural
women and urban housewives.
Jacob Eyferth shows that, in the countryside, women’s work – from growing
sideline crops to making shoes and clothes – played essential roles in maintaining
households’ daily subsistence and therefore subsidizing the “socialist development
regime” that featured extremely high rates of accumulation and low rates of
consumption.27 While the state extracted eighty to ninety per cent of the rural
surplus above subsistence consumption to feed the urban population and reinvest in
industrialization, it did not return the industrial surplus to the rural areas.28 Instead,
it was through making rural women work longer hours after the day shift that the
demand for basic consumer goods was met.
Compared to their rural counterparts, the labor of urban housewives was less extracted,
as the state provided for some aspects of their subsistence. This provision came in the form
of food ration coupons, public housing, healthcare, and other state-subsidized services.
However, urban women’s contribution to accumulation remained crucial. During this
period, according to Gail Hershatter, the “domestic” was totally separated from the
public and neglected by the party-state at the discursive level.29 However,
Shaopeng Song’s pioneering research on jiashu shows that, on the one hand, the state
made urban jiashu a distinct political constituent, reckoning the importance of their
labor in building socialism; on the other hand, it intentionally kept the boundary
between the public and the domestic and never challenged the gendered divisions of
labor within and across the two spheres.30 To a large extent, jiashu labor – including
cooking, childrearing, growing sideline plots, and making basic consumer goods – was
deemed to be their “natural” duty, rather than generating any form of economic value.
Song concludes that by appropriating jiashu free labor, the state was able to keep both
workers’ wages and welfare redistribution low, so that it could reinvest most of the
profits in industrial production.
While the devaluation of women’s work was aligned with the logic of accumulation,
women in the early PRC indeed had agency, navigating various political and social
spaces. In her research on Chinese socialist feminism, Wang Zheng shows that the
preservation of urban jiashu domesticity and the undervaluation of their
27
Eyferth, “Women’s Work and the Politics of Homespun”; idem, “State Socialism and the Rural
Household”.
28
Julia Chuang and John Yasuda, “Polanyi and the Peasant Question in China: State, Peasant, and Land
Relations in China, 1949–present”, Politics & Society, 50:2 (2022), pp. 311–347.
29
Gail Hershatter, “Making the Visible Invisible: The Fate of ‘the Private’ in Revolutionary China”, in Lü
Fangshan (ed.), Wusheng zhisheng (I). Jindai Zhongguo de funü yu guojia, 1600–1950 (Taipei, 2003),
pp. 257–279.
30
Song, “The State Discourse on Housewives and Housework in the 1950s in China”, pp. 49–63; idem,
Chinese Modernity and Socialist Feminist Theory.

reproductive work by the state was not simply what the regime of accumulation
needed.31 Unpacking the seemingly monolithic state, Wang analyzes the political
struggle between the state feminists and the male party leaders in Beijing. She
reveals that the naturalization of jiahsu’s domesticity was a result of the state
feminists’ survival strategy during the Anti-Rightist Campaign, in which their
institutional establishment, the All-China Women’s Federations (ACWF), was on
the brink of being abolished.
Attending to both political economy and historical agency, this study turns to the
convoluted relationship between the lived experience of jiashu and the turbulent
unfolding of the accumulation strategies from 1949 to the aftermath of the GLF in
1962. In other words, the goal of this article is to use an empirical case study to
substantiate the dynamic relationship between political economy and historical
agency in shaping jiashu experience and the landscape of reproductive labor in this
period. In the following sections, I investigate how the state’s changing accumulation
strategies interacted with its unsettling efforts to transform jiashu while continuously
redrawing the boundary between production and social reproduction and
that between paid and unpaid labor. Shifting the focus away from national-level
discourse and major metropolitans, this study draws on the local case of Zhengzhou.
The capital city of Henan province and one of the largest nationwide today,
Zhengzhou was a young cotton-mill town at the dawn of the Mao era.32
Located on the south bank of the middle-lower Yellow River and eighty kilometers
east of Kaifeng, Zhengzhou had remained a modest city in the late imperial period.
During the first decade of the twentieth century, it rose as an industrial town when
the ambitious nationalist-industrialist Mu Ouchu expanded his textile business from
Shanghai to Zhengzhou, opening the Yufeng Cotton Mill there. Mu chose
Zhengzhou because it was expected that the overall costs of cotton production there
would be low. The two newly built major railways, Jinghan and Longhai, crossed in
Zhengzhou, offering economical transportation; Henan was an important
cotton-growing region and a populous province, providing cheap raw materials as
well as cheap labor. Despite initial industrial development, wars, famines, and
frequent floods in the following decades rendered the city almost a blank slate when
the CCP took it over in 1948. As the new regime planned to shift the center of
industrial production inland from the coastal regions, partially due to strategic
security considerations, Zhengzhou resumed industrialization, joining Shijiazhuang,
Xianyang, and others to become one of the six national textile centers.
In the first decade of the PRC, in addition to the reopening of Yufeng, five new
cotton mills and dozens of supporting factories, including dyeing and textile
machinery, were built in Zhengzhou. The city’s population increased sixfold, from
150,000 to about one million in 1960.33 The workforce was composed of a small
portion of experienced workers relocated from far away industrial cities, such as
31
Wang Zheng, “Dilemmas of Inside Agitators: Chinese State Feminists in 1957”, The China Quarterly,
188 (2016), pp. 913–932; idem, Finding Women in the State, pp. 54–77.
32
Zhengzhou became the capital of Henan in 1954. Before that, the capital was Kaifeng.
33
Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo Tongji Ju yu Gongan Bu, Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo renkou tongji
ziliao huibian, 1949–1985 (Beijing, 1988).

10 Yige Dong
Shanghai, Qingdao, and Wuhan, and a large number of young peasants recruited from
nearby villages; approximately sixty per cent of the employees were women. As
newcomers to Zhengzhou, most workers settled in the living compounds adjacent
to the factories, and each of the factories became an industrial work unit, or
danwei. As a nationwide mode of organizing and controlling labor production and
social reproduction, danwei offered an elaborate range of welfare provisions,
including healthcare, housing, and children’s education.34 Many workers in this
study indicated that they spent their entire lives in the same danwei, marrying,
raising children, and retiring, even though these state factories stopped operating
after the mid-2000s.
The following sections are organized in chronological order, tracing jiashu
experiences through the initial industrialization stage (1949–1957), the GLF and the
accompanying Urban People’s Commune movement (1958–1962), and the
retrenchment that immediately followed. However, rather than trying to explain such
changes based on periodization, I attend to variations across time to elucidate how
the subjects, meaning, and boundaries of reproductive labor have been historically
constructed and reconstructed.
Red Housekeeping in the Danwei Compound

“As a jiashu, one must strive to be ‘red,’ diligent, dexterous, and frugal (hong, qin, qiao,
jian), so that she can become a ‘red housekeeper’ (hongse guanjiaren)!” In January
1962, Wang Yuxi, the Head of the Women’s Department of the Zhengzhou Trade
Union, gave a speech at a meeting, encouraging members to “qinjian jianguo,
qinjian chijia” [diligently, frugally build the country, and diligently, frugally manage
the family] – also known as “liangqin” [two diligences].35 This was not the first
time the “two diligences” were brought up. Emphasizing urban women’s crucial
role in housekeeping and linking it to socialist nation-building, the “two diligences”
campaign was first launched in 1957 by the ACWF.
Compared to the ACWF’s initial agenda of “mobilizing women to participate in
production as a means of achieving women’s liberation”, which was part of the
socialist revolution’s founding principles, the emphasis on women’s domesticity is
quite puzzling at first glance. According to Wang Zheng, this sudden conservative
turn in 1957 was a strategic move that state feminists made to protect themselves
from being abolished by the male-dominated top party officials.36 This section,
however, shows that the ACWF shifted from organizing women workers to jiashu
long before 1957, and, through this process, jiashu positions also became fixed in
the domestic space.
When the CCP returned to the cities in the late 1940s, most urban women were not
“proletarian industrial workers” who would easily fit the revolutionary imaginary.
34
Xiaobo Lü and Elizabeth J. Perry, Danwei: The Changing Chinese Workplace in Historical and
Comparative Perspective (Armonk, NY, 1997); Mark W. Frazier, The Making of the Chinese Industrial
Workplace: State, Revolution, and Labor Management (Cambridge, 2004); Duanfang Lu, Remaking
Chinese Urban Form: Modernity, Scarcity and Space, 1949–2005 (London, 2006).
35
Zhengzhou Municipal Archives, 026–106–23 (March 1962).
36
Wang, Finding Women in the State, pp. 54–77.

Rather, the demographic composition of urban women was complex, including

handicraftswomen, peddlers, sex workers, intellectuals, laborers in service sectors,
and family members of the old capitalists and bourgeois professionals.37 As of 1953,
the total number of female employees in all of China’s state-owned industrial
enterprises was 2,132,000, accounting for only six per cent of the entire urban
female population.38
In barely industrialized inland cities like Zhengzhou, the majority of the estimated
150,000 inhabitants in late 1948 were poor manual laborers and refugees. According to
the Zhengzhou Women’s Federation (ZWF), there were about 60,000 women in the
city. Except for a small number of factory workers, sex workers, and housewives of
railway workers, all were “poor working women” ( pinku laodong funü). Most of
them had fled war and famine and settled in Zhengzhou by marrying peddlers,
rickshaw pullers, and other types of manual laborers.39
Facing a devastated economy with a high unemployment rate and complex class
composition, the ZWF believed that their central task should be organizing the
jiashu of the poor manual laborers to “self-rescue by participating in production”
(shengchan zijiu). The ZWF’s work began at the most grassroots level, bringing
unemployed women together and establishing workshops for shoemaking, hand
spinning of linen, sewing, and washing clothes in exchange for cash income.40 In
the first few months of 1949, the ZWF mobilized more than 7,000 women to
participate in these activities.
However, by the mid-1950s, the reach of the ZWF shrank to the sphere of
reproduction, as the landscape of the labor force thoroughly changed in Zhengzhou.
Between 1953 and 1958, six modern textile mills and a series of supporting
enterprises went into production one after another. Tens of thousands of spinners
and weavers, as well as technicians and cadres, came to and settled in Zhengzhou; the
majority of the workers were women aged between eighteen and twenty-five years old.
As a socialist industrial city was in the making, the seemingly “petty” forms of
production, such as handicraft, would soon be diminished.41 The category of “poor
working women” also waned in the discourse of the local women’s federation. It
was against this backdrop that jiashu emerged as a major category referring to
unemployed family members, mostly women, in the danwei system. Although many
37
For research on the dynamic lives of this diverse population, see Zhao Ma, Runaway Wives, Urban
Crimes, and Survival Tactics in Wartime Beijing, 1937–1949 (Cambridge, MA, 2015); Weikun Cheng,
City of Working Women: Life, Space, and Social Control in Early Twentieth-Century Beijing (Berkeley,
CA, 2011); Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century
Shanghai (Berkeley, CA, 1997).
38
Zhonghua Quanguo Funü Lianhehui yanjiusuo yu Shaanxi Sheng Funü Lianhehui yanjiushi, Zhongguo
funü tongji ziliao, 1949–1989 (Beijing, 1991), p. 241.
39
Zhengzhou Municipal Archives, 029–001–012 (February 1949).
40
Ibid., 029–001–008 (June 1949).
41
By the end of 1956, the urban population in Zhengzhou had grown to 410,000, one third of whom were
employed by state-owned or collective enterprises, with women accounting for seventeen per cent. At this
time, all the work-unit employees were from 57,432 households city-wide. Households of work-unit
employees accounted for sixty-eight per cent of the total urban residents’ households. See Zhengzhou
Municipal Archives, Zhengzhoushi Zonggonghui yu Zhengzhoushi Fulian Jiashu Gongzuo Huiyi Huibao
(30 December 1956).

12 Yige Dong
older, less educated women would continue making shoes, sewing, tailoring, and
washing clothes to bring home extra income, they were not considered “working
women” but only jiashu. In other words, their identity was essentially associated
with social reproduction, although their labor was not exclusively so.
Parallel with the “domestication” of jiashu was the shutting off of the ACWF’s
influence from the industrial danwei system. While the ACWF was the first to
incorporate jiashu into their agenda of woman-work,42 according to advice
co-issued by the ACWF and the All-China Federation of Trade Union (ACFTU) in
1951, jiashu should primarily be organized by the factory trade union while being
assisted by the women’s federation.43 In late 1954, a reorganization of the ZWF
departments took place, in which the production department was eliminated
because “it organized and mobilized female workers within the factories and thus
functionally overlapped with [the function of] the factory trade union”. Moreover,
“since supporting social production was the overarching goal of our society as a
whole, it would be redundant to set up a specific department designated for
production”.44
In 1956, the ACWF launched the “five virtues” (wuhao) campaign to help frontline
workers achieve the production goals of the first Five-Year Plan (Figure 1). It called on
jiashu to “manage the home thriftily”, “build solidarity within and among families”,
“provide good education to children”, “take good care of hygiene and sanitation”,
and “attend literacy classes”.45 As Cai Chang, the Chair of the ACWF, stated,
“jiashu of the workers should take a socialist approach to family issues. [They]
should join the ‘five virtues’ campaign without hesitation, helping their husband
and other family members to accomplish the national production plan”.46
In the textile industry, since most single or young mothers were employed in the
production sector, jiashu were usually older women who migrated with their
children or husbands from villages. Besides cooking and taking care of the
grandchildren, many of them joined sewing and laundry groups. For instance, by
1953 there were seventy-one jiashu in the Zhengzhou Number Two Mill, ten of
whom were domestic maids and the rest were the wives of workers. The welfare
department of the factory organized them into seven small groups to provide
collective services to the workers, and fifteen were paid to wash clothes. While in
the past, jiashu had been washing clothes for their own family members, now, in
addition to continuing to do that, they offered such services to many new hires who
42
Following Delia Davin, I use “woman-work” when translating funü gongzuo, which covers all sorts of
activities that the CCP sponsored to empower women, including revolutionary struggle, production, legal
reform, and literacy and hygiene campaigns. See Delia Davin, Woman-Work: Women and the Party in
Revolutionary China (Oxford, 1979).
43
Zhonghua Quanguo Zonggonghui yu Zhonghua Quanguo Minzhu Funü Lianhehui, “Guanyu nügong ji
zhigong jiashu gongzuo lingdao guanxi de lianhe tongzhi”, in Zhonghua funü ganbu guanli xueyuan (ed.),
Zhongguo funü yundong wenxian ziliao huibian, 1949–1983 (Beijing, 1988).
44
Zhengzhou Municipal Archives, 029-100-001 (13 October 1954); ibid., ZMA: 029–025–002.
45
Cai Chang, “Zhigong jiemei yao jiji canjia xianjin shengchanzhe yundong”, in Zhonghua funü ganbu
guanli xueyuan, Zhongguo funü yundong wenxian ziliao huibian, pp. 255–256.
46
Zhonghua Quanguo Zonggonghui Nügong Bu, “Jiashu ‘Wuhao’ Gongzuo”, in Zhigong jiashu gongzuo
jingyan (Beijing, 1957), pp. 1–14.

Figure 1 Poster of the ACWF’s five virtues campaign. October 1957.

Source: ChinesePosters.net, with permission.
chose to outsource such chores. Therefore, the factory administrators believed that this
was a good way for jiashu to ease the economic burdens of their spouses.47
After 1956, when more peasants flooded into cities nationwide to live with their
children or relatives, unions in industrial enterprises began organizing jiashu to
grow sideline plots, raise pigs, and produce basic goods around the danwei
compound. Jiashu were also the key labor resource for maintaining public hygiene
and greening the environment. As quarterly reports on women workers and jiashu
from the Zhengzhou Municipal Trade Union show, in 1956, citywide, jiashu were
recruited to kill the “four pests”48 and to plant trees and flowers in their
neighborhoods. For example, in the second quarter of 1956, jiashu from 400
households from the Number Two Textile Mill dug out thirty kilograms of fly
pupae, and those of the Textile Housing Construction Enterprise killed 500 mice
and planted more than 2,000 trees around their neighborhoods.49
Jiashu not only contributed their free or modestly paid labor to maintaining and
developing the collective space, but they were also at the center of developing the
networks of financial mutual aids within the danwei community. As wages were
generally low, every factory had to set up its own mutual aid fund. Each
participating household was asked to contribute ten to twenty yuan per month to
47
Zhengzhou Municipal Archives, 029–015–008 (8 June 1953).
48
Usually considered part of the Great Leap Forward, the “Four Pests” campaign started in Zhengzhou as
early as 1956. This infamous movement asked the masses to exterminate the following four animals
considered harmful to agricultural production and public hygiene: rats; flies; mosquitoes; and sparrows.
49
Zhengzhou Municipal Archives, 026–046–015 (June 1956); ibid., 026–046–003 (September 1956).

14 Yige Dong
the collective account, and then, once a year, they were able to borrow a large sum of
money from the fund for purposes such as weddings, children’s medical bills, funerals,
and travel.50 Typically, it was jiashu who took care of bookkeeping for their
households. As of 1956, forty per cent of the danwei in Zhengzhou had established
their own mutual aid funds. The number of danwei-based mutual aid funds
increased from 301 in 1957 to 1,423 in 1961, and the number of participating
households increased from 39,239 to 72,602, respectively. This type of network was
most developed around the large textile mills, where workers and jiashu lived in
close proximity to one another. Often, jiashu who managed to save the most money
and spend the least would be praised by the danwei trade union.51
Between 1949 and 1957, most of the work done by jiashu was not considered to be
production and was thus compensated in only a very modest way – if at all. During
this period, few women older than forty could find a regular-paying job. For them,
working in a state-run textile mill and earning a relatively high wage was such a luxury
that only their much younger, better-educated counterparts could enjoy it. However,
the GLF in the summer of 1958, and the following Urban People’s Commune
movement, profoundly reconfigured the jiashu position in the myriad of productive,
reproductive labor, and paid/unpaid work.
Building a Big Socialist Family: Jiashu in the Urban People’s

Commune Movement
Before the “two diligences” campaign could fully materialize in 1957, the next year saw
the coming of the GLF. Under the banner of “women can hold up half the sky”, the
radical initiative pushed an unprecedented number of Chinese women into
production – the domestic-centered discourse of “two diligences” suddenly faltered.
To speed up industrial accumulation and surpass Great Britain, in November 1957,
Mao announced in Moscow that the new development approach would adopt a radical
model to accelerate accumulation by further collectivizing production, intensifying
labor, and minimizing redistribution. This approach abandoned central rationing
and required local governments and enterprises to become self-reliant. The People’s
Commune was an institutional innovation that developed primarily in rural areas
and, to a lesser extent and for less time, in cities, seeking to combine production
and social reproduction and to collectivize the latter so that the state would not
need to spend any money on welfare provisions.
50
These strategies had their roots in the practice of traditional rotating saving and credit accounts
(ROSCA), as described by Matt Lowenstein, “Risk Management in Prewar China: A Study of Rotating
Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs) in Qing Dynasty and Republican-era Shanxi Province”,
Business History, 2023. doi: 10.1080/00076791.2023.2222662.
51
Similar state mobilization of housewives in saving for the purpose of helping the general economy could
also be observed in early twentieth-century Japan and the US during the Great Depression. However, while
housewives in the latter two cases were seen by the state primarily as consumers, jiashu in the Chinese case
were not seen as consumers, as defined in a capitalist context. For the Japanese case, see Sheldon
Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton, NJ, 1998); for the American case,
see Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920–1945
(Philadelphia, PA, 2010).

It was in this historical context that the CCP’s zeal in mobilizing jiashu to enter the
public space cumulated. To the top leaders, mobilizing women to join the GLF consisted
of two components. First, a significant portion of young women who had already been
working outside the home should substitute for their male counterparts, who were now
undertaking new industrial and construction projects that required more intensive labor
or complicated technology. Second, for jiashu, who had never had formal jobs but made
up the majority of the urban women’s population, their tasks now were to join
production or collectivized social reproduction. While a small portion of jiashu would
work in state-run enterprises, the rest self-organized into small factories,
manufacturing workshops, service collectives, childcare centers, and public canteens
within the danwei or neighborhoods-turned-communes.
At the beginning of the GLF, the Party’s top leaders proposed one of the most novel
plans for collectivizing reproductive labor. In a lengthy speech delivered at the ACWF
on 14 June 1958, Liu Shaoqi spoke of the relationship between liberating women’s
labor and advancing production:52
We liberate women from domestic chores not because we are doing women a
favor; instead, this is for overall production, social progress, and achieving
communism, all of which require women to be liberated from domestic labor.
Thus, I’m proposing this solution: to build as many care centers, public
canteens, and public services as we can […] While the primary goal is to
organize production, can’t we also organize urban jiashu and rural women to
transform our daily life and services?
Liu singled out the jiashu role to further justify his proposal:
When I visited workers’ living compounds in Shanghai, I saw small children

everywhere, running around like ants and making a lot of noise. Jiashu, having
to take care of them, prepare meals, and do laundry every day, were unhappy
and bored. Some would rather cook and babysit for others. Why? Because they
thought that rearing one’s own children is “domestic labor”, while taking care
of others’ is “social labor”; the latter is equal to a factory job.
Liu suggested that jiashu collectivize cooking, laundry, tailoring, shoemaking, and
childcare. To him, the sphere of social reproduction could be subjugated to the same
logic of mass production: “Collective service is not merely consumption; it is also
about production. Cooking can be regarded as a form of production – it is food
production, or the food industry. Clothing repair is like machinery repair; haircut is
also a kind of repair. In a nutshell, these are all socially necessary”.53 Liu also
mentioned in passing that, after reproductive labor was collectivized, the “technological
revolution” should follow suit, as was occurring in the production sphere.
52
“Liu Shaoqi’s Speech at the Party Committee of the ACWF”, Database for the History of Contemporary
Chinese Political Movements (DHCCPM)”. Available at: ccrd.usc.cuhk.edu.hk.proxy1.library.jhu.edu/
PrintVersion.aspx?H=g2ajpzws&A=nqoomagk&D=352111144&M=vvj1ftbv; last accessed 2 April 2019.
53
Ibid.

16 Yige Dong
In the same month when Liu Shaoqi gave the above speech, Zhengzhou saw the
incipient development of the Red Flag Commune, the first of its kind in the nation.54
Following the Red Flag, in August, another prominent commune was established that
combined the Zhengzhou Textile Machinery Factory and several nearby
neighborhoods. Despite their appearances in local newspapers and internal
circulations within the Party, these earliest developments were not publicized
nationwide until two years later, in 1960.55 It was in the spring of this year, when
Mao and his allies attempted to provide a “second push” to keep the GLF going amid
the economic crisis and resulting famine, that the Urban People’s Commune became
a national movement.56 It was also in this year that five textile cotton mills in
Zhengzhou jointly formed one meta commune – the Textile People’s Commune –
which was short-lived and was never voluntarily brought up by my interviewees.57
At the national level, the number of women employees in state-run enterprises and
public agencies increased from 3.3 million in 1957 to ten million in 1959. Within the
state industrial sector alone the number increased from 1.3 to 4.9 million.58 In a survey
among twenty-two provinces and cities, 730,000 collective factories and workshops
were established and eighty-five per cent of the members were women. Another
survey among twenty-one cities across the nation showed that 535,000 jiashu joined
public production and service work in 1958. As of May 1960, five million people
were working in the communes, eighty per cent of whom were jiashu.59
In Zhengzhou, according to the local women’s federation, 63,526 people were
“liberated” from the home, and eighty-two per cent were jiashu. Among these
jiashu, 14,000 got jobs in state-run industrial enterprises or their affiliated service
sectors; the rest, about two thirds, were asked to self-organize commune-based
industrial workshops and welfare services.60 To jiashu, working in the state-run
enterprises, even as contract workers instead of permanent ones, was still much
more desirable than joining the collective workshops and service sectors, as the
former offered higher wages, better benefits, and social prestige.
In the Zhengzhou Textile Machinery Commune (ZTM Commune), there were
1,421 jiashu from 1,352 households, aged between twenty and fifty, with 309 over
fifty years old. While forty-two of them had high-school diplomas and thirty-one
had primary-school certificates, the vast majority were illiterate. About a quarter of
them worked in the state sector, but most typically worked in cotton mills as
trainees or contract workers; the rest stayed in the commune to work.
Deemed “unemployable” before the GLF, now the state considered all these jiashu
as “able to produce”. Without concrete plans from higher officials about what exactly
54
Zhengzhou Municipal Archives, 029–035–202 (16 November 1958).
55
“Qiyi renmin gongshe de dansheng”, Zhengzhou ribao, 28 October 1958, p. 1; “Yici weidade shehui
biange. Ji Zhengzhou Fangzhi Jixiechang Renmin Gongshe de dansheng”, Neibu cankao, 18 September
1958, pp. 3–15.
56
For the first appearance of the Red Flag Commune as a model in national media, see “Ba chengshi
renmin jinyibu zuzhi qilai jianshe shehuizhuyi xinchengshi”, Renmin ribao, 7 April 1960.
57
Zhengzhou Disi Mianfangzhi Chang, Zhengzhou Simian Zhi (Zhengzhou, 1989), p. 311.
58
Zhongguo funü tongji ziliao, p. 241.
59
Geng, Zhongguo Gongchandang funü gongzuo shi, Vol. 2 (Beijing, 2016), pp. 194–195.
60
Zhengzhou Municipal Archives, 029–032–005 (5 September 1959).

to do, the grassroots commune leaders and the masses started experimenting with a
variety of production and service work. Approximately 240 jiashu began working in
industrial and agricultural production, while the rest were put in charge of running
the forty canteens and 101 care service facilities, ranging from large-scale care
centers with hundreds of children to mutual aid groups. The latter included a type
of in-home service where one elderly woman took care of three to five children (for
an image of an earlier mutual aid group, see Figure 2). In total, there were 128 care
workers, offering services to 1,550 children, seventy-two per cent of whom were
children in need of care services in the ZTM Commune itself.
By relocating cooking, childrearing, and household chores to the collective space,
the commune system had transgressed the public–domestic boundary. Yet, it was
not easy to shatter the value hierarchy of productive and reproductive labor. Wages
for staff in these newly created care services depended on whether they were formal
employees of the mill or jiashu recruited from the commune. While the former
could earn between thirty-nine and forty-eight yuan per month, depending on
credentials and seniority, the latter’s wages were between just fifteen and eighteen
yuan. Moreover, while permanent employees enjoyed full reimbursement for their
medical bills, these jiashu were reimbursed only half of the costs. In addition, they
consistently received fewer ration coupons for food and other necessities.61
From the state’s viewpoint, collectivizing social reproduction could have saved
reproductive labor that was done by jiashu before the GLF. In the urban commune,
with more efficient ways of doing social reproduction, more jiashu could be freed
from social reproduction and join production, accelerating accumulation in general.
As Liu Shaoqi told the women cadres blatantly, this was not to “do women a favor”
but to increase the “productivity” of social reproduction. However, due to the
following reasons, this approach to collectivizing social reproduction did not work
out and jiashu resistance to such arrangements to a large extent explained the
unpopularity of the urban communes.
First, it seems that the efficiency in social reproduction that the commune was
supposed to bring about was not due to any “labor-saving technology”, as the top
leaders had hoped, but came at the cost of quality of service. To be clear, attempts
to mechanize food processing were made. As early as June 1958, canteens in rural
Henan were reported to have invented machines to make noodles, chop vegetables,
and shred sweet potatoes.62 However, no similar measures were found in
Zhengzhou’s canteens. Sewing collectives asked jiashu to use their own sewing
machines in their work, which, arguably, would make clothes-making more
efficient.63 Yet, for interpersonal services such as childcare, labor saving was based
solely on reducing the service per capita ratio. When care work was based in
the household, the caregiver–child ratio was approximately 1:2 or 1:3. But now, it
dropped to 1:15 in the daycare centers and 1:10 in the kindergartens. With such a
61
62
“Hu Sheng, “Jiawu laodong de shehuihua he jitihua”, Hongqi (1958), p. 7.
63
Interview with Wang Guangliang, 22 October 2016. This is based on Wang’s recollection of his mother’s
experience as a jiashu during the GLF.

18 Yige Dong
Figure 2 “Jiashu self-organized into mutual aid groups. Their services for frontline workers, including
washing their clothes, cleaning their bedding, and especially taking care of those who were sick, has
boosted workers’ enthusiasm in production.”.
Source: Chinese Textile Workers, volume 13, July 1953.
low caregiver-child ratio, many parents were concerned about their children’s safety
and health, hence withdrawals occurred frequently.
Second, since the state did not plan to subsidize these public services, communes
had to resort to their own members to jumpstart these facilities. The ZTM
Commune asked fifty households to give away their homes to set up new canteens;
it also asked each commune member to contribute one to three yuan to secure the
“startup” fund; moreover, for the first two months, jiashu providing public services
were not compensated but instead were “volunteers”.64
64
Gongshe dangwei xuanchuanbu, Zhengzhou Fangzhi Jixiechang Renmin Gongshe ziliao huiji
(Zhengzhou, 1958), p. 22.

After the initial stage, these care facilities were also run primarily on fees collected
from workers. On average, sending a child to the collective care center would cost ten
yuan per month, including meals. With the exception of two productive
workers-turned-caregivers, whose wages were paid by the factory, all other staff
members and daily maintenance workers were paid by fees collected from
children’s parents. For reference, the monthly wage of a spinner or weaver, which
was the most typical job held by a woman in the state mills, was between forty-nine
and sixty yuan. In the late 1950s, most textile workers had families with two or
three small children. Thus, for a dual-income family with an estimated total income
of 100 yuan, sending all children to the care facilities (twenty to thirty yuan) would
cost one fifth to one third of the family income, a portion too high to be considered
feasible in the eyes of many parents. Thus, while, in theory, fees collected from
parents should have been enough to run the care facilities, in reality some facilities
had trouble enrolling enough children to sustain themselves.65
Third, the wages received by those jiashu now working in the public domain were at
the bottom of the pay scale, approximately thirty to forty yuan per month.66 In 1958,
the Number Four Mill recruited fifty-three jiashu to staff their childcare facilities.
These jiashu complained that “doing childcare work was not secure. You could be
removed from the position any time, and you would not be eligible for trade union
membership. You don’t have working years counted toward seniority for pension
matters. You don’t even have an employee ID card!” With strong resentment, some
temporary care workers even hoarded food that should have been served to the
children.67
Even for permanent employees in the state-run mills, low pay for childcare work
made it a job that most people tried to avoid. Young graduates hoped not to be
assigned to a kindergarten job, which they viewed as indicative of lower status and
“no future”. Due to a lack of care work staff, some women who had worked in the
frontline workshops were relocated to care centers. Feeling upset, one of them
grumbled, “Now, my wage is 46.7 yuan a month, which is the lowest in my
workshop but the highest in the care center! In the future, when the economy gets
better, wages in the workshop will increase, but I bet that in the care center they
will not”.68
Due to the hierarchy between productive work and service work, most jiashu
preferred employment in a workshop and learning a technical skill, such as
carpentry, over serving in the canteens or care centers. One of them refused to join
the canteen and said, “I’ve been working around the stove for my whole life. No
more cooking!” Another complained, “Hasn’t babysitting in the home been
enough? Why are you still asking me to do that [outside the home]?”69
65
Zhengzhou Municipal Archives, 029–051–023 (10 February 1962). Based on the investigation by the
ZWF, in 1961 seven out of twenty-five commune-run care centers surveyed were shut down due to lack
of enrollees.
66
Note that of the 10.5 yuan/month kindergarten fee, 6.5 would go to food costs. Given that the caregiver
to child ratio was 1:10, it seemed that most of the revenue had gone to care workers’ wages (30–40 yuan).
67
68
Ibid.
69
Gongshe dangwei xuanchuanbu, Zhengzhou Fangzhi Jiexiechang Renmin Gongshe Ziliao Huiji, pp. 8–9.

20 Yige Dong
Adding to all the above-mentioned problems, collectivization, including the

concentration of cooking and childcare, did not necessarily reduce families’ costs of
social reproduction – instead, the opposite was often true. Indeed, some jiashu
complained that joining the public canteen and using the childcare service had
increased their spending, because all family members had to pay the canteen fee; in
addition to paying care service fees, they also had to buy formula since
breastfeeding was not possible.70 For example, Sun Yulan began working in 1959 at
the age of forty-four, and her monthly wage was twenty-four yuan. She had three
children and the total cost of care service was thirty-six yuan, much more than she
could earn.71 Theoretically, one could argue that, despite the relatively high cost,
collectivization and remuneration of care work was an innovative way to transfer
economic resources from the patriarchal community to women individuals. In
reality, however, when the only legitimate unit of resource allocation remained the
household, even women who started earning wages did not welcome this new
arrangement. The extra income brought in by the wage-earning jiashu could not
offset the extra cost of losing free domestic labor.
The Post-Leap Retrenchment and the Re-domestication of Jiashu

In June 1961, as the economic and social crises deepened, the most atrocious
manifestation being the great famine in the countryside,72 the central Party shut
down the GLF investment drive. In urban areas nationwide, with sharp budget cuts,
about twenty-eight million urbanites consuming grain rations had been sent to the
countryside by July 1963.73 Within the same period, the number of female
employees in state enterprises and public agencies was reduced by 3.5 million, that
is, from ten million in 1960 to 6.5 million in 1963.74 In 1962, among the 176,000
employees in state enterprises in Zhengzhou, 34,000 were laid off, approximately
11,000 of whom (thirty-four per cent) were women.75 Of these women, 3,450 were
jiashu, who would return to their urban homes. In the same year, among the total
of 548,000 urban residents, approximately one tenth were sent to the countryside,
one third of whom were jiashu.76
70
Zhengzhou Municipal Archives, 029–050–013 (10 October 1962).
71
Ibid.
72
While the exact number of people who died as a result of the famine remains controversial (most
estimates fall into the range of between 15–40 million), there is a consensus that this famine is one of the
greatest human and economic catastrophes in history, with responsibility lying with the CCP. Felix
Wemheuer, “Dealing with Responsibility for the Great Leap Famine in the People’s Republic of China”,
The China Quarterly, 201 (2010), pp. 176–194.
73
Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 (New York, 2013), Kindle version,
p. 811.
74
Geng, Zhongguo Gongchandang funü gongzuo shi, p. 224.
75
Zhengzhou Municipal Archives, 029–050–013 (20 October 1962). Although this document does not
provide the gender proportions of the layoffs at the municipal level, the author’s calculation, based on
numbers from the Gazetteer of Zhengzhou No. 4 Mill, can shed some light on this matter. In this mill,
the percentage of female workers dropped from sixty-eight per cent in 1959 to fifty-seven per cent in 1962.
76
Zhengzhou Municipal Archives, 029–050–013 (20 October 1962).

Responses to the retrenchment varied across groups. For jiashu, a small proportion
(approximately twenty per cent) found it a relief to escape the temporary factory or
commune job as long as they were allowed to stay in the city. These women were
either physically weak or had too many children to look after. Some were from
families in which the husband earned much more money and, as explained earlier,
where it would actually be more economic for these families to have a jiahsu at
home instead of sending their children to care facilities.77
Other jiashu, although not particularly disappointed at the abrupt dissolution of
the commune, expressed their willingness to continue performing a variety of
service work in exchange for extra income, as they had been doing before the GLF.
Through the assistance of the local residential committees and women’s federation,
they were able to begin vending street food, sewing cloth soles for shoes, doing
in-house nanny work, knitting sweaters and bags, haircutting, doing hourly work in
small workshops, and other similar jobs in their neighborhoods. On average, they
could earn twenty-five to thirty yuan per month, similar to or even slightly higher
than what they earned through their commune work. These jobs were also more
flexible in terms of time and location; much of the work could be brought home to
finish.
The strongest resistance to the retrenchment was from the more than 3,500 textile
workers who had held permanent positions in the state mills before the GLF but who
were now being asked to leave for good and become jiashu. Having enjoyed the
economic and social prestige of being state workers, they saw the layoffs as both a
large economic loss as well as a personal humiliation, worrying that their husbands
would “look down upon” them. In the Number Five Mill, for instance, there were
about a thousand jiashu-turned-workers who refused to be sent down. Their
average age was thirty-nine, and they earned fifty yuan per month – quite a decent
income – with an average of 3.7 children each. They pushed back strongly, citing
the tremendous “financial burden” they would face if they lost their job. In the end,
the Number Five Mill could not relocate them but kept them employed at the factory.78
Soon after the end of the Urban People’s Commune movement, the Zhengzhou
Trade Union, in collaboration with the women’s federation, resumed the “five
virtues” and “two diligences” campaigns. This time, the entire industrial system was
facing harsher conditions, with a worsening economy and severe scarcity. Once
again, jiashu were asked to fulfill their role of “red housekeeping” to survive the
hardship, by producing more sideline plots and basic consumer goods, as well as
keeping a closer eye on each individual household’s bookkeeping to make savings.
Not all developments in social services during the GLF were in vain. While the
urban communes, with their makeshift canteens and care centers, all vanished, in
the state-run factories many care facilities remained and continued to function. The
number of childcare facilities in November 1961 dramatically dropped from 1,934
77
Ibid.
78
Ibid. Evidence from other industries showed the same dynamic. Both workers and jiashu tended to push
back hardest when they were requested to go back to the countryside. For instance, Shi Huajin, a male, skilled
worker in an oil refinery, committed suicide on 1 May 1962 in protest at the order to send him down.
Zhengzhou Municipal Archives, 026–099–010 (15 May 1962).

22 Yige Dong
at the peak of the GLF to only 138 citywide. However, the total enrollment number in
1961 was 2.2 times higher than it was in 1957, and the staff number had increased from
603 to 2,616.79 It seemed that the GLF had helped to cultivate a new sense of need
among working parents, that is, the need for public care services. Having benefitted
from such services, many of the frontline workers expected the factory to continue
offering them.
In late 1961, after the readjustment of the national development strategy, state
enterprises were allowed to spend more on welfare services, and care service fees
were lowered, especially for children under three. In the ensuing four decades,
kindergartens run by the state mills had become the best in Zhengzhou and even
gained some fame internationally.80 Overall, based on archival information and
interviews, about half of working mothers had sent at least one of their children to
the childcare facilities provided by the mills during the socialist period. Those who
had to leave their children with other members of their families did so mainly for
financial reasons.
Conclusion
Focusing on the lived experience of jiashu in a local community, this article is, firstly,
an empirical account of an important yet overlooked group of people in the history of
socialist China. It demonstrates that the work of jiashu was not only central to the
formation of the socialist regime of accumulation, but that their struggles around
the changing boundaries between the “public” and the “domestic”, as well as those
between the “productive” and “reproductive” also partially contributed to derailing
the GLF – one of Mao’s most ambitious projects.81 These findings can shed light
on two fields of study, as outlined below.
First, this study advances our understanding of women’s work in relation to regimes
of accumulation. Feminist political economy has revealed that, under capitalism,
accumulation is not solely reliant on “exploitation” – that is, appropriating formal
workers’ “surplus value” in the workplace while only paying the cost of workers’
self-reproduction – but it also operates through “expropriation” – that is, extracting
fruits of uncompensated labor in extra-market arenas, such as colonialism, slavery, as
well as “housewifization”.82 Such processes of “primitive accumulation” also happened
79
Ibid., 029–051–020 (30 March 1962).
80
In fact, as the author argues elsewhere, the heyday of collective care of the danwei was in the 1980s and
early 1990s, when state enterprises were allowed to retain more profits and redistribute them within the
danwei. See Yige Dong, “From Mill Town to iPhone City: Gender, Labor, and the Politics of Care in an
Industrializing China (1949–2017)” (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University, 2019).
81
Nancy Fraser’s concept “boundary struggles” is illuminating here. While Fraser highlights historical
actors’ agency in contesting and shifting the arbitrary boundaries between different social spaces, my
analysis emphasizes that when such boundaries were largely set and reset by the state during the Mao
era, jiashu on the ground exercised their agency by conforming, questioning, or challenging those
boundaries according to their own economic or social needs. For a discussion on “boundary struggles”,
see Nancy Fraser, “Contradictions of Capital and Care”, New Left Review, 100 (July/Aug 2016), pp. 99–117.
82
For an in-depth discussion of “exploitation” and “expropriation”, see Nancy Fraser, Cannibal
Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do about
It (New York, 2022).

in historically existing socialist societies, as recent literature suggests. In the case of

“housewifization” specifically, in both systems, women’s unpaid work in the household
was an essential constituent of the economy. In this regard, socialist China was no
exception. However, as I show in this article, what is novel about it is that, in China, a
more radical approach to expropriating women’s work arose during the short-lived
Urban People’s Commune movement.
To top leaders like Liu Shaoqi, social reproduction itself should have been a site of
“mass production” in order to accelerate industrial accumulation. In this new system,
accumulation took place not only through diverting women’s labor power from the
“unproductive” domestic sphere to the sphere of production; it also happened
within the sphere of collectivized social reproduction. Through establishing urban
people’s communes, the state replaced unevenly developing welfare programs with
collectivized yet unsubsidized care and service labor, the majority of which was
performed by former jiashu. In other words, the collectivization of reproduction in
the urban commune was not only meant to free up more labor to enter production,
but it was also to turn social reproduction itself into a site of “mass production”,
latently following the same logic of concentration and centralization that dictates
modern industrial production.
However, unlike the sphere of mass production, where mechanization and
automation had already been introduced and were arguably advanced as a result of
the “technological revolution” that characterized the GLF, the realm of social
reproduction was much more difficult to mechanize due to the interpersonal,
service-based nature of its labor process. To boost “efficiency”, communes had to
resort to an alternative approach, that is, reducing the number of care workers per
recipient, at the expense of service quality. This arrangement, inevitably, led to
considerable discontent and resistance. Overall, the reification of the production
logic undermined the regime’s own purpose of quicker accumulation, as it failed to
recognize that the logic of social life can never be reduced to that of the industrial
economy.
Second, this study goes beyond the impact of structural forces on women and closely
examines the interplay between political economy and historical agency. Despite their
labor being expropriated by the regime, jiashu demonstrated remarkable agency amid
the fluctuations of socialist industrialization. While the state’s discourse increasingly
linked jiashu to domesticity and social reproduction, on the ground these women
accomplished much more. In addition to tirelessly working around the clock at
home, they also provided a range of services in the danwei and staffed both
production workshops and collectivized reproductive facilities during the GLF. Their
vital labor not only cared for the workers, but also held the community together.
Nevertheless, jiashu did not always conform to the expectations set by the
party-state. As they had always worked for the survival of their families, jiashu were
never the “parasites” of society that the state portrayed them to be. Whenever there
was an opportunity to generate additional income for the household, they would
seize it. However, when such work was imposed by the state and the trade-off
became too burdensome, as demonstrated in the case of the GLF, jiashu pushed
back. They complained about such coerced “liberation”, showed a reluctance to
send their children to public care facilities, and withdrew from care jobs – the most

24 Yige Dong
underpaid and precarious work among all types. Indeed, at times, they simply refused
to take up those assignments. The fate of the Urban People’s Commune movement
might have been predetermined, as by the time it resurfaced in 1960 the nationwide
famine had already reached its peak and the starving peasants could not continue
subsidizing urbanites’ work and life as they used to. Yet, the problems endogenous
to the urban experiment and its participants’ resistance to it are essential to our
thorough understanding of this historical process.
My emphasis on the interactions between structure and agency and the respective
consequences also highlights a fundamental message in critical gender studies. By
applying a gender lens to examine history, we not only bring justice to those who
were once marginalized by the hegemonic discourse, but we also offer a more
comprehensive explanation of why historical processes unfold in certain ways. In
the case at hand, without attending to the question of women’s work and social
reproduction, our examination of the Great Leap Forward would have been
incomplete.
Cite this article: Yige Dong. “Red Housekeeping” in a Socialist Factory: Jiashu and Transforming
Reproductive Labor in Urban China (1949–1962). International Review of Social History (2024), pp.
1–24. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706

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International Review of Social History (2024), pp.

“Red Housekeeping” in a Socialist Factory: Jiashu

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Women’s Work, Social Reproduction, and Regimes of Accumulation

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Women’s Work, Reproductive Labor, and Industrial Accumulation in

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Red Housekeeping in the Danwei Compound

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Rather, the demographic composition of urban women was complex, including

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Figure 1 Poster of the ACWF’s five virtues campaign. October 1957.

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Building a Big Socialist Family: Jiashu in the Urban People’s

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706 Published online by Cambridge University Press

When I visited workers’ living compounds in Shanghai, I saw small children

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Adding to all the above-mentioned problems, collectivization, including the

The Post-Leap Retrenchment and the Re-domestication of Jiashu

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706 Published online by Cambridge University Press

in historically existing socialist societies, as recent literature suggests. In the case of

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000706 Published online by Cambridge University Press

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